


Fool in the Rain

by bluesyturtle



Series: You Know You’re My Desire [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Crack Treated Seriously, Dating, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Family Feels, Fix-It, I Don't Even Know, Insecurity, Jealousy, Kidnapping, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, POV Alternating, Relationship Problems, Rugby, Sequel, Stabbing, Strangulation, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, What Have I Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-03-21 08:28:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3685284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an alternate ending for the other Browntier fic I wrote that takes place after Chapter 2 (and discounts 3 and 4). You should probably read at least the first two chapters of that before jumping into this, but hey, I won't tell you how to live your life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bron-Y-Aur-Stomp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [genhuang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/genhuang/gifts), [Velvet_Worm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Velvet_Worm/gifts).



> _Well, if the sun shines so bright, or on our way it's darkest night / The road we choose is always right, so fine / Ah, can your love be so strong when so many loves go wrong / Will our love go on and on…_
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you, Liza, for kicking my ass into gear and giving me the motivation to finish this littler bugger. <3333

Matthew wakes up with something covering his eyes, the lurch of moving ground beneath him, and his hands bound behind his back. He tries to roll over onto his knees and flops off what feels like the backseat of a car onto what is definitely the unpadded floor of a car. The fall nearly knocks the wind out of him and if landing on his face wasn’t bad enough, he bites his lip bloody on impact.

“Calm down, Matthew.”

He freezes. Fear spikes cold through him before he can rein it in and replace it with anger. His voice doesn’t come out as strong as he’d like even then: “Randall, what _the fuck_?”

“We’re going on a ride.”

“Am I tied up in the back of your car?” he protests, voice breaking in equal parts disbelief and indignation. With a great deal of trouble concerning his bound hands, he manages to wriggle onto his side. A brief, blind search with his foot tells him where the seat is and he kicks it with both feet, trying hard not to fold his unprotected toes as he does while shouting, “ _Randall_ fucking _Harland Tier_! Stop the goddamn _car_!”

“No,” Randall says simply, unbothered by Matthew’s growled profanities. “I don’t think so. We’re almost there. Stop kicking my seat.”

“I’m gonna murder you,” Matthew seethes, twisting his neck until he can nudge the blindfold down over his cheek and eventually beneath his nose where it gets stuck. It’s dark in the car and outside. “Randall.”

Randall turns to look at him over his shoulder, expression impassive before he faces forward again and murmurs, “Matthew.”

He takes a breath and strains his wrists. From what he can tell without looking, Randall bound him with zip ties. Fantastic.

If he weren’t certain that the last thing Randall would do is sell him out to Hannibal Lecter, Matthew might suspect him of it now in this intensely strange encounter. For all intents and purposes, this expedition they’re on looks like it ends in one of them dying and the other going to jail—some odd variation thereupon. Matthew can’t say yet. All he can see from his vantage point is that it doesn’t look good.

Usually situations of that sort are negotiable. Matthew’s talked his way out of plenty in the past. He’s even been on the other side of it: allowed others the chance to talk their way out of his sights, even if it was only a chance and nothing more.

Randall’s such a wholly different type of person that Matthew doesn’t see that option yielding results unless they’re what Randall already wants. To think that he can’t truly predict what it is that Randall would take from him now…that he can’t decipher the honesty from the bluff or vice versa…

Matthew doesn’t acknowledge failure so much as he shoulders past it until he can claim victory of some sort from it, but he acknowledges his position in the backseat of Randall’s car as a stark, ridiculous failure. The basest part of his brain that deals primarily in survival screams at him to devise some sort of countermeasure—a defensive strike that will tide him over until he finds himself in a place to attack, but the upright-civilized-man portion of his brain whispers for him to be still, to wait.

 _All things in their time_ , he thinks. _Patience with nature and with man._

And even if he’s something in between nature and man, Randall _is_ in between. Matthew’s learned in their short time together how to be patient with him. Randall doesn’t tend to make him wait very long anyway. Now should be no different.

“What are you doing?” Matthew tries after a few minutes more of silence— _minutes_.

Randall hums, turns the car right, and drives a ways further before stopping the car. He kills the engine and gets out of the car, going around to the trunk while Matthew thrashes, reality sinking in even as he tells himself there’s no way what he thinks is happening is really happening. The door at his head opens and sends in a cold, slow brush of fresh air. Matthew strains to look and Randall crouches to make it easier on his neck.

“I changed my mind about what you said,” he says without preamble, lifting a hand to Matthew’s forehead and playing idly with his hair as if he hasn’t just abducted him. “I don’t want you to go after Dr. Lecter.”

“Okay,” Matthew answers slowly.

“I thought we’d do this instead.”

Uncertain, he asks, “What _is_ this?”

Randall runs his hand between Matthew’s shoulder blades and taps his finger over the raw patches of skin at his wrists. Matthew curls in on himself, trying to watch, but all he manages to do is tip over onto his stomach again. Randall has a strange, deathly air of calm about him that commands attention. As much as Matthew tells himself not to be afraid, it would be like telling someone staring down a hungry lion not to be afraid. He doesn’t believe he saw this side of Randall before or that he appreciated it completely if he did.

The fingers smoothing down against Matthew’s are steady, gentle, and dry. Randall’s not nervous, isn’t afraid. There’s no reason he should be. The ball’s in his court.

“Have you ever heard of a stag hunt, Matthew?” he asks in his characteristically muted, dull voice.

Matthew has, in fact, heard of stag hunts, but he shakes his head no. Randall doesn’t buy it.

“Hawks are birds of prey: hunters. All your talk of being one of them, and you expect me to believe you don’t know what a stag hunt is?”

“It’s a test of wills and social cooperation,” Matthew says in one rushed breath, tensing his shoulders when Randall insinuates his hands beneath Matthew’s arms and turns him over onto his back abruptly.

He sneezes and sits up, sneezing again before Randall climbs into the car behind him. His legs line up with Matthew’s back, the sheer presence of him more comforting than should be possible. Randall pulls the door shut behind him, and Matthew curses himself under his breath, vehemently, for not even trying to scream.

“And what else?” Randall asks, moving to stretch out _unbelievably_ on the backseat, propped up on his elbow so that they can see eye to eye, which Matthew finds incredibly ironic.

Matthew swallows. Randall’s eyes are so blue. He has one more thought of trying to reason with him but dismisses it.

“There’s a stag the hunters want, but there’s no guarantee they’ll get it. A hare comes by and it’s a sure thing for one of them, but if they go after it, neither of them gets the stag. The only way they can get the stag is if they both cooperate, but they know they’ll eat if they hunt the hare instead.”

Randall watches him. He says, “We’re the hares, Matthew.”

“What?” Matthew frowns, more confused than anything. “We?”

“What do you think I’m here to do?”

Matthew shakes his head, speaking before he can hold his tongue: “Until about ten seconds ago, I thought you meant to kill me.”

“You don’t think that now?”

“Are you?” Matthew leans his head back to watch Randall reach into his pocket and produce a pocket knife. He meets Randall’s eyes, asking, “Going to kill me?”

“No.” Randall drops his gaze to follow his hand where he slips the blade in between Matthew’s wrist and the zip tie. He looks at Matthew and holds his hand still, not enough pressure on the knife to cut him loose. “Are you going to fight?”

“No.”

Randall cuts the tie, and Matthew’s arms drop out to the side, leaden. He brings them to his front and rubs at his wrists.

“For a minute there I thought you were going to make me run through the woods so you could hunt me,” Matthew mutters. He stretches his shoulders and doesn’t bother to inch away from Randall’s knee where it’s pressed solidly against him. Randall’s silence makes him raise his eyes, and somehow, the look on his face doesn’t inspire enthusiasm. His heart sinks. “You’re going to make me run through the woods so you can hunt me.”

“I don’t want to starve to death,” Randall says quietly, placid eyes widening at the admission. “The stag is never coming, not for us.”

Matthew looks away and fumbles to climb up onto the seat next to Randall, who helps him get situated. When he can bear it, he turns to look at Randall and waits for him to return his glance. It takes a few seconds, but Randall does lift his eyes from where they were fixed on Matthew’s hands. There’s a lone wrinkle in between his eyebrows.

“I didn’t know how to tell you why your plan can’t work in a way that you would hear.”

“So you kidnapped me,” Matthew says around a tiny huff of laughter. A curl of warmth stirs in his belly when Randall ducks his head to hide the wrinkles that bloomed at the corners of his eyes. “Well, at the risk of encouraging you to kidnap me every time we have a disagreement, I’m listening.”

Randall bites his lip and blindly reaches for Matthew’s hand to weave their fingers together. His jaw clenches and unclenches, and Matthew is torn between leaning in to kiss his cheek where he can see the muscles dance and grabbing Randall’s face in his hands so that he’ll look at him without breaking away again. Matthew does neither of those things and waits instead.

“I need you to tell me that this isn’t enough for you.”

He squeezes Matthew’s hand and pulls his leg up onto the seat beneath himself. Matthew watches him take a breath to steady himself, and when it looks like he can’t find the words to continue, he tugs their hands into his lap to hold Randall’s in both of his. Randall rubs the back of his free hand across his forehead, and Matthew catches it, too.

Randall sighs, a terse sound that doesn’t match the blank set of his face. He yanks his hands out of Matthew’s grasp.

“Tell me that this isn’t enough for you.”

“Randall…” Matthew starts to shake his head, but Randall flinches away from him. “Randall.”

“You want your stag, you have to tell me you want it, and if that’s what you want, this isn’t enough for you. I’m not enough for you. I need to hear you say it.”

It should be easy to say it. They’ve had a week unloading their memories and hopes and dreams onto each other—a week. More drastic things could happen in a second, though, couldn’t they? Randall could ease the knife out of his pocket and slit Matthew’s throat; Matthew could try to take it from him and cut him before Randall does him first, but neither of them moves. They stare at each other. Randall stares at him like a wounded animal, aglow with fear that looks like rage and hunger that looks like madness.

“Damn you, Matthew Brown,” Randall mutters, lips twitching downward and eyes going glossy. “Damn you for a coward.”

The next time Matthew leans to touch him, Randall heaves his body at him and pushes senselessly with both hands until they’re flattened in the backseat, Matthew on the seat and Randall on top of him. Matthew fusses for a handhold on Randall’s arms but can’t get leverage. He starts shouting Randall’s name, but the blood is rushing in Randall’s ears and he wants to kill Matthew and he’s shaking him by the shoulders and making a wretched, wailing sound through gritted teeth.

All his life leading up to something like this: to a claiming moment, to a breaking point, to the edge of a cliff. The reason still being that he’s not good enough, that he can never be enough…

Not enough for himself, not enough for Matthew…

He opens his eyes at a sharp bite of pain in his arm. Matthew’s fist shakes around the pocketknife buried in his bicep. His other hand is closed around Randall’s forearm in a desperate vise. Randall relaxes the fingers he’s tightened around Matthew’s throat, blinking and sucking in a breath. Matthew gasps, coughs, and sputters beneath him. He doesn’t release his hold on the knife. Randall places both hands flat on Matthew’s chest and counts the heartbeats hammering against his palms.

Randall catches his breath while Matthew does and eyes the knife until Matthew lowers his hand. He fingers the aching skin bisected around the blade and yanks it out in one swift tug. His hand comes away generously smeared with blood, but the wound itself isn’t gushing. He flattens his hand over it anyway and counts the pounding drum of his migraine until his breathing evens out naturally.

Voice stripped, Matthew says, “Hey.”

“Hi,” Randall croaks, distant and trying not to be.

Matthew clears his throat, swallows, and clears it again. He still sounds rough when he asks, “Are you back?”

Randall bleeds, dripping slowly down the wrist of his uninjured arm and collecting a small puddle in the crevice of his elbow. The red gets on his jeans and on the leather car seat. It takes a few long moments of really not being back at all for him to honestly answer, “I’m back.”

He watches Matthew close his eyes like he’s relieved, dry lips parted around a long sigh. Randall wonders if he would have killed Matthew had it not been for the pocketknife. 

“That’s the thing about choosing the hare,” Matthew says in his hoarse voice with his eyes fluttering open. They’re the same green as pond water. He tries to clear his throat once more, jaw tightened around the bounce of tension in his vocal cords. “It might not feed everyone.”

Randall would admit to not having considered the metaphor through to all its philosophical ends and lexical ambiguities, but Matthew isn’t wrong. It had been, perhaps, a touch ambitious to just dive right into abducting his boyfriend—boyfriend?—without so much as a whisper of warning. He’ll be making reparations for this stunt, Randall can already tell. And somehow, yes, he can also tell Matthew is going to _let_ him make reparations, even if kidnapping, strangulation, and stabbing in self-defense amount to quite a bit more than a ‘stunt’.

Speaking of reparations…

“I’m sorry I strangled you,” Randall says evenly, softly.

“Didn’t look like you knew you were doing it until you stopped.”

Randall whispers back into the space between them, “I might _not_ have stopped.”

He sees and hears Matthew’s swallow.

“Did you still want to hunt me?”

“Would you let me?”

Matthew sighs softly, still trying for his bearings. “What does that mean?”

Randall clambers off of Matthew, at first with every thought of not getting blood on him but then not caring at all since it’s all over his shirt anyway— _Oh,_ and a lot more than he’d thought at first. _Damn._ —and sits near the window. It’s cold when he presses his forehead into it. The fingers on his arm are slippery but warm.

“Why should I answer your question when you won’t answer mine?”

Matthew stays sprawled out on the seat with his knees folded. After a moment, he carefully sits up and ruffles his hair with his hand. He drags it over his face and down to his chin.

“Fine,” he grouses, leaning over the median between the driver’s and passenger’s seats to get at the glove compartment. He brings back a wad of napkins and shoves them at Randall’s bloodstained sleeve, pushing his hand away and catching a rebellious burst of it on his wrist. “Fine, Randall. You called it. You called my bluff. I want this. I want you. I want _on_ this weird fucking ride with you, and if it kills us, then it kills us both, and Will Graham—”

Randall gives him a dark look in spite of the lightness creeping through his brain like a mist. Matthew abandons the next thing he was about to say and drops his gaze back to the task at hand. A flash of worry flickers over his brow and his lips press together, but he doesn’t voice the thought he’s having so loudly Randall can read it on his face.

“It’s us.” Matthew tucks his leg up onto the seat so he can swivel around and face Randall fully and look into his eyes with his fingers resituate over the soaked napkin. “It’s us, and that’s not a compromise.”

“If you’re saying that so I won’t try to kill you again…”

“I’m not.” Matthew narrows his eyes and gestures pointedly with his chin to the bleeding orifice on Randall’s arm. “Seriously? I could probably take you right now. You didn’t tell me you were a hemophiliac.”

Randall frowns, mumbling, “You jabbed the entire thing in my arm, you dunce.”

Matthew scoots forward on the seat and gets Randall’s face in his hands. He looks prepared to scold Randall again but kisses him instead, first on the apple of his cheek and then on the temple, staining him just so with his bloody lip. His hand is a constant weight where Randall’s pulse drums the loudest, having stolen his migraine’s thunder.

A beat skips and he moves down to Randall’s jaw to mark him there, too. Randall bunches his fingers in the collar of Matthew’s shirt, pauses to consider his options, and deciding, pulls Matthew to him for a proper kiss that crushes just before it softens. Randall skims his fingertips up Matthew’s throat, feeling for the bruise that will show on his freckled skin. His fingers venture higher to the scar on Matthew’s chin and they separate.

“You know you’re supposed to leave the blade _in_ when you get stabbed, right? That’s probably why you’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”

Randall musters a groan and tugs at the shredded sleeve, jostling the dark red wad of napkins. They inspect the wound together and Matthew laughs, actually _laughs_.

“I hate you.”

“Hate me? You should be thanking me for not making your first kill a petty crime of passion—nothing more human than that.”

Randall winces.

“We should probably go to the hospital, get you stitched up.”

“No,” Randall mutters, shying away from Matthew’s touch now while he’s been allowing it all along. He reaches blindly for the door handle and stumbles out into the cool night with Matthew right at his heels. “There’s a kit in the trunk.”

“What?”

But Matthew is following him anyway and finds the small, unmarked case Randall checked when he first parked the car. He allows Matthew to shove him onto the barren trunk with his left arm facing the empty spot beside him. Matthew roots around until he finds the needle and an unassuming container of dental floss. Woozy, Randall watches him thread it through and then sniff the length of floss.

“Unscented,” he notes aloud, expertly dousing the needle with the rubbing alcohol. “I guess that’s better than a minty fresh stab wound.”

Randall glares at him, but there’s not much heat behind it. He probably feels sick because he didn’t have dinner last night—or lunch, come to think of it. The last few days haven’t been good to him stress-wise, and when that happens, he sometimes forgets to eat, and…

Panic spikes momentarily through him and he tries to remember when he last took the Risperdal. It hasn’t been long enough for him to be bombarded by negative side effects, he doesn’t think. He’ll just need to resume doses when he gets home. And also eat. He should eat something. And call Josie. She’ll want to know he’s okay.

“Randall, earth to Randall.”

“What?” he snaps, albeit weakly.

“I was asking where we are.” Matthew peers at him closely and raises his eyebrows when Randall doesn’t answer right away.

“Patapsco Valley State Park,” Randall tells him, easing back so he can lean sideways against the car. Matthew flails slightly to follow him with the needle. “Mountain bikers come up here mostly, from dawn till a little after dusk.”

“What time did we get here?”

Unfazed, Randall says, “3 AM.”

Matthew makes an agitated noise and scoots closer, knocking the medical kit out of his way. Randall rolls his eyes and takes it up into his lap.

“Do I want to know how you got me in here without waking me up?”

“I only have to top you twice to know how to knock you out for the night,” Randall tells him without flourish.

In spite of his considerably darker-than-usual mood, Matthew laughs. As dark as it is outside, Randall can tell Matthew’s blushing from the tiny, amazed smile tugging at his lips. He doesn’t chew on his lip like he does when he’s nervous, though, and Randall appreciates that Matthew can sit here with him after the violent confrontation they’ve had and not even fidget with his hands or tap his feet. It’s just one more example of Matthew’s widespread calm, so deeply ingrained into his temperament that he can relax into situations like this one honestly without forcing it.

“I brought you out here because I wanted to show you that we could make this work without them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that I’m…not happy like this, like—” He sighs and closes his eyes. “But you understand. You’ve seen. You’ve…done.”

“Because I’ve killed?” Matthew asks slowly, eyes boring into Randall’s the second Randall opens his. He tugs accidentally on the stitching now attached to Randall’s arms and clenches his jaw at the tiny noise Randall makes. Softer, he asks, “You think that’s what you need?”

“No, it’s not about that. I can’t explain what it feels like.”

Matthew focuses diligently on the rest of the gash until it’s satisfactorily sewn up. He digs through the kit again and produces a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He checks with Randall’s eyes before setting the cleaned needle back and cuts out a length of cotton gauze to cover him with.

They’re both soaked in places with blood, rubbing alcohol, and hydrogen peroxide. The drying sections of their clothes are wrinkled and crunchy. Randall’s sleeve is tattered in three places where the knife and their fingers wrenched it open.

“We need to…” Matthew mumbles, flushing red when Randall looks up at him. He clears his throat. “You’re taking me on a date tonight.”

Randall blinks. “I’m what?”

“If we’re doing whatever the hell this is _again_ , then you are wining and dining me first—sex not mandatory, but hey, if you’re feeling adventurous, I’d be up for anything.”

“Matthew, what…I don’t…”

“Randall,” Matthew sings, poking him in the chest before he sweeps that hand back to indicate the many trees and the dirt and the open air. “We’re doing this, but you’re also taking me on a date. Consider it an apology for nearly killing me.”

 _Reparations,_ Randall reminds himself dourly.

“Fine.”

“You _can_ negotiate, you know. That’s part of the deal.”

“What deal?”

“The ‘relationship’ deal, Randall.” He sighs, looking as tired as Randall’s whole body feels. “What if we take the day, make an event out of it? You can shave, go to the museum, work on the suit until I get home, and then we’ll have dinner someplace nice. I’ll tell the Stag he can go fuck himself.”

Randall cracks a small relieved smile, but he’s wary of Matthew’s offer. It sounds too good to be true—too simple to just _happen_ all that they might have a chance to try and keep this thing they have alive.

“I should wait until these heal up. Wouldn’t want to bleed on you twice in as many days.”

“Then you’re taking me out to dinner twice,” Matthew says, words merging into a kiss on the corner of Randall’s mouth. “We can make it a ritual.”

“How domestic,” Randall says, aiming for optimism but erring more on the side of self-conscious uncertainty.

The tiny smile drops from Matthew’s face, but bereft of it, he looks more concerned than unhappy. Randall looks down, buzzing still from exposure and blood loss and hunger. It’s almost too much for him to see Matthew watch him with his soft, spellbound eyes as if anything about Randall is even remotely mystifying. He holds his breath, startling at Matthew’s arms weaving Randall’s and tugging him forward.

They pause where Randall can count Matthew’s heartbeats and predict the skips in rhythm.

“This all right?”

“The intimate stuff?” Randall asks stiffly into the side of Matthew’s neck.

“You said it was unfamiliar.” Matthew squeezes his fingers so Randall’s shirt rucks up at the back. “I wondered if my touching you everywhere this past week would have changed that.”

Randall hums and forces himself to relax. He can’t decide if his impulse is to collapse or to run. Both instincts are pretty much the same in his mind: they surrender the same kind of closely protected vulnerability. Matthew doesn’t release him.

In spite of how utterly awkward Randall’s hands are, Matthew merely waits for them to settle on their own, which they do, miraculously. His right hand roosts on the acromion and his left hooks around the base of Matthew’s neck. There’s blood dried and flaked under his nails, and he doesn’t marvel at all that it’s his and not Matthew’s. He even registers a small blip of gratitude way, way down in some deep recess of his mind or heart—wherever those emotions come from.

“In all seriousness, we probably shouldn’t make a habit of kidnapping each other. It doesn’t inspire trust,” Matthew murmurs into Randall’s hair.

“What if I ask you first next time?”

“ _Next time_? Oh my God.”

\--

Matthew unlocks the front door to Randall’s house—an actual house, he’s surprised to note—with the key Randall gave him that morning when they drove back to Matthew’s apartment and slept for another few hours before Randall had to leave for work. His day ended a good two hours later than Matthew’s did, so by the time he walks in, all he hears is the whir of an electrical saw coming from beneath the floorboards.

He walks through the hall, searches until he comes upon the cracked door letting out the noise, and follows it to some stairs that lead down. Before daring to turn the corner that will bathe him in white light he calls out experimentally, “Hey.”

The saw stops. He steps out to see Randall standing with the electrical saw in both hands, a monstrosity of a thing stood up before him on display, receptive to modifications. Randall says, “Hi,” but Matthew barely hears him.

He turns his head belatedly for the kiss Randall places on his cheek, eyes fixed on the suit. Randall hadn’t mentioned showing him the suit as a precursor to getting him to come over tonight before dinner, and it had been pretty far from Matthew’s mind—not the most brilliant call on his part, really.

“Whoa.”

Randall looks pleased, in that subliminal way of his. He says, “Dinner? Give me twenty minutes.”

Matthew nods dumbly and carefully approaches the beastly apparatus done up in animal bones and steel and mechanized joints Matthew can’t even conceive of. Randall’s footsteps retreat up the steps, obviously trusting Matthew not to make a mess of things in his absence, which makes his heart soar stupidly the whole time he stares at the suit that would rival an upright bear crossed with a wolf.

His hand wanders near the beast’s fangs and explores each one with the very tips of his fingers. By the time Randall has come back, changed into a nice shirt with his hair combed back, Matthew hasn’t moved from his spot. Randall sidles up behind him and wraps his arms around his middle.

Their bodies fit together tensely at first, more out of awkwardness than because either one of them makes the other rigid or uncomfortable. Matthew hitches his shoulder up fractionally to coax Randall’s chin onto the curve of his neck. He goes willingly and taps his fingers out spasmodically over Matthew’s navel. The erratic pace of it doesn’t feel intentional—not like the perfect, calculated geometry of the bear suit.

“How was work?”

“Long day,” Matthew replies with a small shrug. “I spent the better part of the afternoon threatening Abel Gideon with abuse from the staff if he breathed a word of what he heard me saying about Dr. Lecter. This was _after_ he spent the morning grandstanding about Lecter’s ‘false alarm’ a few nights ago. Apparently, the FBI’s guarding him under lock and key.”

Randall sighs, evidently not a fan of anyone having dirt on them. His breath tickles Matthew’s ear.

“What’s his deal anyway? Gideon? I know what he did and why he’s there, but what’s his play in all this? Why does it matter if he has leverage?”

“He’s got some kind of grudge against Will Graham,” Matthew answers, nearly avoiding the name altogether but going for it anyway because they’re both adults and Will Graham isn’t Voldemort. “Because he shot him, because he got him caught—take your pick. He has this thing in his file about mistaking his identity with that of the Chesapeake Ripper, and for whatever reason he’s invented, Graham’s part of the obsession.”

Randall goes quiet behind him but offers nothing when Matthew turns to face him. All he says is, “We should go. I made reservations.”

Matthew notices, now, that Randall is suited up, the tie knotted at his throat acting like a point to an exclamation mark. He’s impressed, deeply.

“ _You_ made reservations?” Matthew asks in lieu of _You didn’t tell me I had to wear a tie, Randall._

“ _Reparations_ , Matthew. Let’s go.”

Their reservations are for the Charleston where Randall stuns Matthew by ordering hundred dollar meals for both of them, which is absurd but also perfectly reasonable somehow. He expects to stand out for his lack of a jacket or tie, but he figures at least his shirt is moderately nice and unwrinkled.

The ambient lighting and the low din of people talking all around them does a funny thing to Matthew’s perception of Randall. In the very short time that they’ve known each other, Matthew really hasn’t seen him in a social setting. The Annabel Lee Tavern where they met was the opposite of crowded, and outside of the one occasion when Matthew picked Randall up at work, he’s never quite seen him interact with other people face to face. It’s uncanny.

He’s the same person. He’s unnervingly the same. His face doesn’t open with unreserved happiness in a show of politesse when their server comes to bring their drinks, the stiff set of his shoulders doesn’t loosen to create a casual, unimposing slouch, and the tempo of his speech, unhurried to the point of mimicking a drawl, does not quicken. Randall is completely himself exactly how a tree growing through marble and crashing a wedding is exactly itself.

 _A bit like Odysseus’ olive tree in the Iliad_ , Matthew muses.

The mushroom soup they have brought out for the first course is salty and warms his whole body beginning with his stomach, which is a nice feeling to have in Randall’s company. It’s on their third course that he realizes Randall’s started them off on some laudably casual small talk, and about halfway through the fourth, Matthew learns that Randall really, really loves lentils.

Randall’s neck and the apples of his cheeks go a startling pink when Matthew shovels his helping onto Randall’s dwindling portion. Their server comes back to replace Matthew’s iced tea and wisely doesn’t comment on Randall’s muttered complaints. She comes back to top off Randall’s glass of water and leaves again as silently as she came. Matthew considered ordering wine for himself, but he has a creeping suspicion Randall doesn’t even like the smell of the stuff and tonight is supposed to be about both of them.

Besides, Matthew thinks Randall looks happy enough wolfing down his extra little mountain of lentils unselfconsciously. It gets better when they order dessert because Randall apparently has multiple stomachs, and while he doesn’t particularly lose his mind over things that are too sweet—at least according to Matthew’s palate—he has an incredibly disarming affinity for the tartelette. 

Randall rolls his eyes at Matthew’s evident awe when he polishes off the simple pastry topped with ricotta quenelles and the smooth, sour glaze of lemon. He nudges his foot under the table, gets his ankle instead. Matthew stifles a grunt and ends up giggling.

He actually giggles.

Randall shakes his head but a smile tugs at his lips all the same, and he really can’t help touching his fingers to his forehead just to block Matthew’s view of him for a few seconds: to hide his embarrassed grin, to pretend at indifference, to protect himself…until Matthew gently swats at his wrist and holds his hand briefly on the table before letting go.

 _You’re going to get us into trouble,_ Randall doesn’t say. Matthew knows already; always has a better gauge for people and social environments than Randall can boast of himself.

Randall drives them back to his house instead of Matthew’s apartment and goes through the motions of checking and re-checking his meds. He calls Josie while he’s still in the bathroom closing the medicine cabinet and hears Matthew fiddling with the TV in the living room. It’s at a respectable volume, but it’s audible all the same: game show, _click_ , Oprah, _click_ , cooking show, _click_ , telenovela…

Randall waits, listening with his eyebrows furrowed as the line rings.

_Click._

His lips are rolled together around a chortle when Josie answers, saying in her sugar-crystal-sweet voice, “Randall?”

She heard him laughing. Usually she begins with a greeting instead of his name.

“Hi. Josie, hi.” He clears his throat and haltingly adds: “I’m just, checking in.”

“Uh huh,” she replies slowly in that knowing, older-sibling tone that carries the sound of what her smile looks like when it’s pointed at him. Her tone takes on a note of compassion that’s never been patronizing or pitying: “Sounds like you had a good day.”

Court TV, _click_ , crime drama, _click_ , laugh track, _click_. 

“You could say that,” Randall tells her honestly. “I went out to dinner. My friend and I went out, to the Charleston.”

“To the _Charleston_? Randall, did you get yourself a sugar daddy? Are you _someone’s_ sugar daddy?”

“You say that like you think I’m cheap,” he mutter flatly, not all that bothered in the first place but still. She’s no stranger to his rumbling monotone anyway. “I splurge.”

“You’re adorable,” she coos at him through the phone. “Name one creature comfort you’ve got in your house, Randall. Diana _made_ you take the TV when you moved. Do you even have books, a stereo?”

He bites his tongue around mention of the workshop in the basement. It hardly aligns with the kind of thing she has in mind, and no way is he going to try to explain to her that work is a comfort to him—probably the only real comfort he has outside of rugby.

Car commercial, _click_ , telenovela.

Randall listens for the subtle sound of the channel flicking, but all he hears is the volume drop a few notches. Matthew likes Spanish soap operas.

“Wait, so you’re telling me you paid, right? Are you dating this person?”

She’s still smiling, if her sunny tone is anything to measure by. Grinning, most likely.

“His name is Matthew.”

The impassioned dialogue—entirely in Spanish—halts from the living room.

“My sister’s asking about you,” he calls, leaning his head out of the opened bedroom door and into the hallway. Matthew shuffles a bit on the couch but doesn’t come to meet him. The telenovela resumes, the worst part of the scripted argument already glossed over. He starts to push the door closed when he hears the dialogue mute again and says, “Josie, not Diana.”

Randall waits for Josie to tease him, but she’s gone radio silent on the other line. He turns the handle on the doorknob so it doesn’t click when he shuts himself away in his room and sits on the edge of his bed.

“You have questions.”

“Uh, yes. You—to my knowledge anyway, you’re not really a fan of the dating scene.”

“It didn’t start as dating.”

“Oh. _Oh_. Randall!”

“What?”

But Josie laughs and he can’t find the fault in his admission, open and easy as it was to share with her.

“Are you serious about him? _Ran_ dall! How long have you been seeing him?”

“A little over a week now. I guess we’re pretty serious. He’s not so bad.”

He imagines Matthew wrinkling his nose at the last comment and rolls his bottom lip between his teeth. The last time they talked about Randall’s precarious love life, he was seventeen and pretending to be enamored with a counselor at school. Dr. Lecter had recommended him to another therapist a month later. Josie never seemed to connect the dots.

Josie tells him after a short pause that she’s happy for him.

“Let me know if you boys upgrade from ‘pretty serious’,” she says, voice much more subdued than before. “I can tell you like him.”

Randall swallows and loosens his tie.

“Yeah, I’ll tell him you said so. I gotta get back now. Call you later?”

“Mm-hmm. Love you, Randall.”

“I love you, too.”

Matthew’s stretched out on the couch watching his show when Randall comes out of the bedroom. He toes off his shoes, drops his jacket on the armchair, and daintily removes his wristwatch, setting it on the coffee table beside the remote control. He lifts Matthew’s legs and sits on the far end of the couch with those legs laid up on his lap and a muscular man pleading with a gray-haired elder. The latter has a fantastic mustache.

“Do you want me to turn it off?” Matthew asks out of the side of his mouth.

“No.”

Matthew watches the remaining twenty minutes of the program while Randall studies his face. Even in spite of the flashing colors sprayed over his face from the light of the television, Randall can make out the differences in his expression as they match up with the soundtrack and the decibel of the characters’ speech.

His eyebrows pinch together at the faster exchange, perhaps in concentration. Whenever the music picks up dramatically out of nowhere with ominous drums, his eyebrows do the opposite and shoot up toward his hairline. Randall nearly laughs when Matthew does at the (probably very) shocking reveal of an as-yet concealed pregnancy. He makes a displeased groaning sound at the supposed father’s reaction to the news and shakes his head at the mother-to-be until she slaps him and storms off, causing Matthew to smirk. Randall takes to rubbing at Matthew’s ankles and working his fingers up to his calves, vision sliding between the screen and Matthew’s face.

When the program ends and the TV goes dark, Randall considers diving across the couch and pressing his lips anywhere Matthew keeps unguarded from him, but he hesitates with his fingers warm on the tops of Matthew’s socked feet. Matthew stretches and his shirt rides up to reveal a sliver of his stomach, and instead of attacking him with a primal urge he doesn’t feel, he says, “Josie thinks I’m your sugar daddy.”

Matthew laughs, a loud, full-bodied sound that bounces around house and reminds him of what it’s like to stand on the cusp of a cliff overlooking canyons.

“She wants to meet you at some point.”

Matthew’s grin softens to a smile. He asks, “Did she say she did?”

“No, but that’s Josie.” Randall shrugs a shoulder, fingers squeezing at Matthew’s ankle where his sock and the hem of his jeans part to leave his skin bared. “She would have said it if she thought it wouldn’t scare the hell out of me.”

“Does it?” Matthew shifts his feet in Randall’s lap and sits up. “Scare the hell out of you?”

“Should it?”

“I don’t know,” he admits baldly, bending his knees so he can inch forward onto the middle cushion. “I’ve never had to introduce someone to my family.”

Randall lifts his hand to cover Matthew’s, somewhat on autopilot. Maybe it’s because he’s only just gotten off the phone with Josie, but he has a vague idea of how people are expected to react when conversations take this inevitable turn. He’d only had the presence of mind to utter an apology in the bar when Matthew told him about his brother. Growing up it was Josie who told him how to respond to vulnerability in other people.

Diana’s reaction had always been to pretend she didn’t see what was happening to him or how it ached in him like atrophied muscle. No matter how much he cried or screamed or lashed out at his schoolmates, it was Josie who always tried to help him and who always saw in him a fully formed person to be stood up again whenever he bent or collapsed under pressure.

“Josie will think you help me be normal. Diana will think you’re like me.”

Softly, with a small smile to match his voice, Matthew says, “Nobody’s like you.”

Because he feels like it’s the thing to do, Randall doesn’t say, _You are._

He’s not sure it’s the truth yet, even if Matthew is the closest relationship he’s had in years that parallels the fruitless, unsustainable craving he had for Dr. Lecter as a boy of seventeen. It’s unsavory, remembering, when he’s _hungry_ for Matthew.

Matthew kisses him on the corner of his mouth and holds there for a few uncounted seconds before turning his head to slot their lips together, Matthew’s upper lip pressing into the divide between Randall’s. He uses the angle to tug Randall’s bottom lip with his teeth. Low heat unfurls in his belly and licks up inside him, bathing everything in warmth that stays warm without burning him, even after Matthew pulls away.

Randall steadies his heart rate while Matthew stares at him with heavy lidded eyes.

“What are they like?”

“Who, my sisters?”

Matthew nods his head and folds his legs underneath himself on the cushion. His hands are warm and light on Randall’s shoulders, one thumb dipping beneath the collar of his shirt to trace circles into his skin.

“Diana’s really into music,” Randall answers with a shrug, but he smiles mysteriously and flicks his eyes up to Matthew’s when he pokes him. “Hmm?”

“You were thinking about something,” Matthew prompts him, mimicking Randall’s hush.

“Oh, just…” The calm smile on his face flickers with the shadow of uncertainty. Matthew considers backing down but then Randall’s fingers are sliding over the back of his hand and brushing his palm to hold him in place. “One of my earliest memories is of her learning to play Chopsticks on our dad’s piano. It was awful.”

Matthew keeps his laugh under wraps but lets his teeth show momentarily in his smile. Randall looks at him, looks _through_ him for a startling second, and drops his gaze to Matthew’s mouth. He raises his hand and presses his thumb to Matthew’s chin.

“You have really nice teeth.”

Matthew snaps his teeth at Randall’s thumb and smirks when he just barely misses the digit.

“And what about Josie?” he asks, getting them back on topic. “She play an instrument?”

“No, her strength’s always been with people. She teaches kids—young ones. Elementary school.”

A slow smiles stretches across Matthew’s face. Randall raises an eyebrow at him.

“Your sisters are a musician and a schoolteacher?”

“Yes. What of it?”

Randall looks like he’s trying to be annoyed at Matthew, but he looks more curious than put out.

“You’re a family of humanists,” Matthew tells him like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but it catches Randall off-guard. He frowns and slackens his shoulders into a deflated slouch. Something like light enters into his eyes as his eyebrows draw together.

“ _I’m_ a humanist?”

“You work in a museum, Randall.”

Randall starts to protest but stops with his mouth open and his eyes fixed on a spot over Matthew’s shoulder. Matthew looks at their hands and moves his jaw back and forth, considering his words before he says them out loud.

“Before he left for New York, Tim used to say everybody had a really important part to play in whatever piece of the world they’d been born into—like a calling, I guess. He said good and bad don’t get chosen for you but that you make it, and I believed him, or I tried to, for a long time.”

“And then the towers went down.”

“And then the towers went down,” Matthew repeats after him blankly, heart palpitating oddly in his chest and sucking the breath out of his lungs. “He wouldn’t have liked what I did to that man in Manhattan. It’s ironic how we end up contradicting what they’d want for us, isn’t it? Tim saved people for a living, died doing it. Your sisters…”

“Matthew.”

He breathes in deep and lets it out all at once.

“Dinner was nice tonight. Thanks.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the dress code.”

Matthew shrugs and smiles toothily on purpose, saying, “Didn’t bother me. And besides, I got to see you devour a tiny lemon cake.”

Randall rolls his eyes, impassively blue and hardened by immeasurable disappointment as a regular feature of his face. They look softer now, warmer—maybe it’s just a trick of the light. Matthew studies the cold blue of those eyes, spellbound and endeared.

“So, that’s what they do. What are they like? Diana and Josie, I mean.”

Randall leans his shoulder into the couch back to turn and stops to grimace and suck air through his teeth. He moves his hand to his arm and probes gently at a spot halfway between his shoulder and his elbow. There’s a spot of blood on his sleeve that Matthew feels tremendously guilty about, no matter how necessary it had been in the moment. His own hand moves to his throat where the bruised skin runs slightly hot.

He worries they’re about to have another conversation about what happened that morning but instead listens, charmed, when Randall begins to tell him about how different his sisters are instead: Josie’s affinity for math that allowed them to bond, Diana teaching Randall basic self-defense when she’d started learning from her first boyfriend at about age 16. He was tiny as a kid, and they both teased him for it relentlessly. Their mother favored the girls and their father favored Diana for her musical inclinations. Randall had contented himself being Josie’s favorite, which he continues to be even today.

Matthew tells Randall about Tim and their father’s hugs—how they were hugging men, and even if Matthew never exactly fit cleanly into that cookie cutter life, he always loved their hugs.

Randall gets a solemn, sorrowful look on his face at the confession, and understanding immediately, Matthew leans in and closes his arms around Randall’s back. He holds him close, careful about his wounded arm, and murmurs, “They had to teach me, too.”

He’s slow about it, but eventually Randall brings his hands up to Matthew’s back and holds his shoulder blades in his palms. His chin rests tiredly on Matthew’s shoulder, the pulse in his neck fluttering near Randall’s cheek. The house is quiet around them: no noisy neighbors, no cars racing down the street outside, no indications that the house is settling. It’s only him and Randall and their beating hearts, their slow, even breathing, and the occasional crinkle of their clothes rustling beneath their fingers.

It’s calm. Randall is calm.

And a few minutes more of this meditative silence is all it takes for his body to agree with his mind. He relaxes, moves his legs, and sinks into Matthew’s front.

Matthew can hardly believe Randall embodies so many impossibilities. He can’t believe he feels so small when Matthew looks at him and sees a giant: a genius and a virtuoso that all his life people have been looking right at and missing.

Randall lets himself be held, and Matthew lets himself be still.

\--

Surprisingly little transpires in a week. He’d expected it would be harder to wait for the ‘stag hunt’—that they’d be more impatient about working toward it, but the time passes easily. Matthew goes to work, visits Randall at the museum once, and befriends his co-worker, a traditionally attractive woman named Kira, who doesn’t immediately understand the nature of Randall’s relationship with Matthew. She flirts with him right up until Randall frowns spectacularly at him, prompting Matthew to apologize and re-introduce himself as Randall’s boyfriend.

It’s interesting sex they have that night. Randall’s good when he’s territorial, even if that kind of thing would ordinarily raise red flags with him.

Rough as he gets, there’s no threat from Randall when they go to bed. He’s not the stranger Matthew fought in the car. He isn’t even the unfocused barfly Matthew met at the Annabel Lee Tavern. When it’s Randall’s hands and mouth on Matthew’s skin and when he lies back and lets Matthew take the reins, he’s someone familiar, intimately known, memorized.

His skin looks angry and puckered where Matthew got him with the knife. Randall takes to poking and smacking the healing flesh with one hand once it gets sturdier, defending the behavior as a test. He gives Matthew a knowing look when he pops a stitch and oozes slow drops of blood from the tear in his skin.

“It would be better to rip a hole in my arm here than out there at 4 in the morning.”

“Point,” Matthew cedes.

The afternoon before the agreed date for the hunt, Matthew requests to leave work early so he can crash a certain rugby match going down in Catonsville. Randall told him the night before that he wanted it to be the trial run for their stag hunt. He seemed to think the opposing team would provide more of a challenge than Matthew will on the early morning in question. Matthew’s just curious about the physicality rugby promises. He’s seen evidence of Randall’s wiry strength, his resilience, but rugby is a supremely hands-on sport.

Matthew can’t wait to see him get knocked around, run like nothing can stop him, and take down anyone who stumbles into his path. He’s thought about whether Randall would even have the energy to hunt him after rugby, much less to drag them both out of bed at 3 AM again.

“Oh, plans tonight?” Chilton asks in that characteristically snooty tone of his that Matthew would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little fond of.

“My boyfriend’s got a rugby match,” Matthew says easily in an airy voice he doesn’t use often. Chilton’s mild expression of surprise tells him he hadn’t had any presumptions about Matthew’s sexual preferences, at least not the kind that he actually has. It’s not the first time he’s been assumed straight until proven otherwise. He’s sort of disappointed, to tell the truth. He really thought Chilton at least _suspected_. “He doesn’t know I’m going. I just want to surprise him, you know?”

Randall had smiled ever so subtly when he told Matthew he’d secured a spot on his usual team for the match. He couldn’t say no to the gleam lighting up those typically dim eyes with nothing more or less than excitement, not that Randall had indicated that Matthew’s support or attendance would alter his attitude about the experience.

“Oh,” Chilton replies, the epitome of grace and articulation. “Well. Enjoy your night, Mr. Brown.”

“Thank you, sir.” He tips his chin and ducks out of the office to retrieve his things before fleeing the building. Chilton meets him in the lobby to impede his escape. “Was there something else, Doctor?”

Chilton watches him and visibly changes his mind. He blinks and curtly shakes his head.

“No, that’s all, Mr. Brown. I’ll see you back on Monday.”

Matthew puts miles between him and the hospital, gets to the rugby match, and finds the stands impressively crowded. He had, for a moment, worried that he would arrive to find himself at a private event populated only by players and referees. There’s a small group of people huddled together on the ground level at a corner cheering for someone called Harold. He stations himself next to them and searches for Randall in the fray of running bodies and the elusive ball passed among the players.

He finds him in a dark green shirt that reminds him of a hunter’s camouflage and flushes hot all down his throat and chest the first time a player in black barrels through Randall like a train through a brick wall. Peripherally, he sees the white blip of the ball passed delicately onto another player on Randall’s team. Even better than the flash of the other player taking Randall down hard and fast is the way Randall bounces to his feet as if he’s lighter than air.

Matthew bites back his smile when he sees Randall contemplate the player on the ground before offering a hand to help him up. The match resumes. Randall runs like it’s what he was made for, and Matthew can barely contain his whooping praise when Randall darts through the gaps in the other team’s defenses to get them halfway across the field before a wall of opponents boxes him in and forces him to pass the ball to another runner in green.

One of the women who’s been yelling for Harold to get his ass in gear turns to look at him and informs him, not unkindly, that he’s on the wrong side of the field. Matthew considers staying anyway because he doesn’t care and she doesn’t appear to be bothered either, but just then someone blows the whistle, and the players scatter on the field. At first he thinks it’s halftime, but green’s side is cheering like the whole thing’s just been won.

He sees Randall head for the other side of the field to drink from a water bottle and walks to him with his hands buried deep in his pockets. Randall sees him as soon as he straightens out and one corner of his mouth, bloody where his lip goes from supple pink to burning red, twitches.

“I didn’t think you got off work ‘till later.”

Matthew wants to kiss him and taste the blood on his tongue, taste the adrenaline coursing through Randall’s veins. They’ll have this all to themselves, running and woods and dark.

Velocity and force and speed. The crushing pressure of gravity.

“Is that it then?” Matthew asks, rocking on his heels slightly and tilting his head to look at Randall’s mussed hair, his skin shiny with sweat and exertion. “We win?”

“We?” Randall asks with a crooked, open-mouthed smile that takes Matthew’s breath away.

“Well, did we?”

“No, Matthew. There’s another forty-minute half.”

Randall stares at him, squinting briefly like he expects Matthew to complain or make some excuse to leave, but that assumption couldn’t be further from the mark. Matthew smiles and breathes, “Oh, good.”

Short of dragging Randall behind the stands and making out with him, that single response will have to satisfy him. Randall parts his lips like he’s about to say something when a stout, beefy guy in a tight green shirt to match Randall’s yells for the team to huddle up and discuss strategy. Matthew steps back and slinks into the stands to roost next to a man and a woman, unmarried but, he learns, a long-term couple. The woman talks a lot of trash about the black team while her boyfriend’s ears go red at the tips. He’s shy, Matthew supposes. That’s all right.

He sees Randall scan the crowd for him when the huddle disperses, so Matthew trots back down to the benches, not keen on leaving him alone when he doesn’t want to be. Even if he wasn’t asked to be here, he is here now. And Randall looks light, so light and relieved.

It doesn’t surprise him now—when it did previously—that Randall might think a run with Matthew through the woods would make some hollow part of him whole to the brim. Just looking at him is exhilarating. Randall comes alive when his body’s pushed toward a limit. There’s no room amidst the full effort of his biology for his mind to plague him with the usual doubts and fears of inadequacy. Fresh-faced, flushed, chest heaving, one section of hair screwed up in a sweat-soaked spire on his head…

“You’re fucking hot, do you know that, Randall Tier?” he mutters, looking Randall right in the eye.

It happens to be the perfect position for seeing Randall’s pupils flutter blacker with interest. Matthew grins at him, ever the wolf, and Randall rolls his eyes and looks away.

“Hey, Tier!” someone shouts, bringing a goddamn behemoth of a person to match the booming voice to their side. “You bring a friend? Name’s Harold.”

“Oh,” Matthew says before Randall can introduce them. He clocks the guy’s black shirt and nods. “I was on the wrong side earlier. I think I met your friends. I’m Matthew.”

Harold shakes his hand, grip tight but not crushing: Matthew’s personal favorite variation among male-to-male greetings. He’s a good-looking guy with a unique kind of beauty that Matthew might not have seen if the guy weren’t in an athletic setting, sweating. Randall clears his throat.

“Harold plays on our team sometimes. He’s something of a switch.”

Matthew skips over the comments he wants to make about flexibility and just goes with, “Interesting.”

“I’m a switch and you’re a pinch hit.” To Matthew he says, winking, “Guy comes and goes as he pleases. But he’s a fast fucker—see him run? I only ask ‘cause I’ve never seen him bring a friend before.”

Randall’s face looks a lot redder when Harold finally trots off to greet a spectator in the stands behind them. He stands straight and tall, but the downward hunch of his shoulders tugs the corners of Matthew’s mouth into the same curve.

“I feel like that was my fault,” Matthew murmurs after a few seconds pass in awkward, stilted silence. “I’m sorry if that was my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Randall mutters, sounding oddly resigned and choked anew by that thing he carries with him all the time. He sighs and smooths his expression into one of perfect indifference. “It’s not even his fault.”

Matthew’s heart sinks and the whistle blows and Randall goes back to the field with his teammates. Matthew jogs back to his place in the stands next to Monica and Pavlo. He doesn’t think he imagines the frustrated bursts to Randall’s strides or that he pushes himself a lot harder than he did in the first half, and Matthew has the profoundly frightening thought that Randall chasing him could be either one of those extremes with no middle ground in between: hard and angry or jubilant and free.

As fast as he runs, his anger doesn’t dissipate gradually or burn out after any number of bodily collisions he meets on the field. It doesn’t even come with the final score turning up in Green’s favor. They meet at the benches and Matthew spends the duration of the walk to the car lot wondering what the appropriate thing to say would be until Randall shoves him up against the side of his Jeep for a bruising kiss that nearly drops Matthew on his ass. Randall’s raw and thrumming, and the dark twist of anger he’d been fuming with the whole second half of the match fizzles out between them with Randall’s hot hand in Matthew’s hair and their hips pressed together.

Matthew is a well of calm, and instead of mourning how dangerous that makes him as an individual and how dependent that makes Randall, he kisses Matthew harder, much to the irate and irritating protests of at least one parking lot attendant. 

_Oh, well._

He wants Matthew bad that night.

Notwithstanding screaming muscles and unapologetically athletic odors, Matthew follows him into the shower, all tender hands and soft-spoken encouragements that mean nothing or the world, maybe, who really knows. He thinks Matthew’s the famed salesman type—the one who could sell ice to a polar bear with hardly any effort at all.

And Randall aims to be the polar bear, doesn’t he? It’s a fitting analogy.

“You see me peddling ice lately?” Matthew asks him idly while he’s kneading the tension out of Randall’s shoulders. Randall mutters a vague wordless response into the pillow and stretches his neck beneath the roiling touch of Matthew’s oiled hands. “You don’t strike me as the kind to buy anything you don’t need.”

“You and Josie,” Randall starts to say but stops at the sharp dig of a knuckle into a sore spot that smarts right before smoothing into liquid pleasure. He groans and Matthew bears down harder.

He doesn’t remember the point when it transitioned from Matthew’s hands working the knots out of his back to Matthew’s fingers twisting inside him and easing him open. He doesn’t remember a time in that haze of sensation when he moved from nonsensical conversation with Matthew to shamelessly moaning exultations into his arm. Matthew drags him down from the pillow and Randall growls at the slide of sheets raking up against his cheek, bunching up in the claws of his hands. 

They’re at Matthew’s this time because Randall didn’t want to go home—wanted instead to belong somewhere else, in the company of someone else. Wanted to be wanted where he wasn’t entitled to stay but invited, welcomed. Wanted to be under Matthew’s body with the smell of sandalwood burning in his nose and Matthew’s teeth marking him, biting the cartilage in his ear, nipping at his cheek, sucking dark spots into his shoulder where his clothes will hide them.

Randall’s been hard for an hour it feels like when Matthew eases them onto their sides and pushes into him in one slick, fast glide that sparks behind Randall’s eyes when he closes them hard. He holds on with both hands while Matthew works him from behind, hands divided between Matthew’s hip and the edge of the mattress. The sheets come off their neat little corner, but Randall stops paying attention when Matthew’s hand slides up his throat to pull his head back into his chest.

Close and breathless rutting is fantastic, but Randall eases forward and separates himself from Matthew to twist onto his back. Matthew doesn’t need to be told what to do. He doesn’t need to be told to hold Matthew close like they’ve been practicing when he comes, shuddering with his whole body and crushing Matthew’s waist with stinging, shaking legs.

Sticky and exhausted, Randall splays his limbs out on Matthew’s bed. The room is a cloud of complicated smells that, combined, makes Randall want to sleep for ten hours uninterrupted. He barely even feels Matthew cleaning him off, stroking up his thighs and belly carefully with a warm, wet towel. The few droplets that made it to Randall’s chest, Matthew licks clean with his tongue.

“Did you do that on purpose?” he mumbles to Matthew when he’s returned to the bed with a clean sheet for them to sleep under.

“Do what?” He falls into bed to lie on his side and puts one hand around Randall’s back. The other he folds beneath his head. “Intentionally knock you out for the night so we don’t have to get up in four hours? Well, Randall, I _have_ topped you twice by now. That’s all it takes, remember?”

Randall’s eyes snap open and catch the cheeky, fatigued grin on Matthew’s face. His complexion is unevenly smattered with splotches of red that Randall can feel mirrored in the heat inside his own skin. Randall lets his eyes drift closed for a huge yawn that he buries in the pillow.

“I was supposed to take you out before we went anyway.”

“That’s right,” Matthew notes almost like he’d forgotten.

As if.

“You’re not making reservations for the Charleston again, are you? That place is too expensive and you’re not actually my sugar daddy.”

“Aren’t I?” Randall rumbles sleepily.

“ _No._ If you were my sugar daddy, we’d be in a fancy hotel using a fake name and not in my crappy apartment.”

 _I like your apartment,_ Randall feels himself wanting to say. Is it the ‘right’ thing to say, or does he mean it?

“Of course you like it. You’d live in a cardboard box and be happy.”

“You _did_ live in a cardboard box at one point.”

Matthew pokes Randall’s forehead.

Perfunctory, he mumbles, “Ow,” and squeezes Matthew’s ribs near the bottom of the oblong cage they form. He’s rewarded with a tired laugh and a frail little convulsion.

Randall opens one eye at Matthew’s continued, muffled chuckling.

“What?”

Matthew shakes his head, the pillow case ruffling his hair and sending a sweet current of his sandalwood-soap-and-sweat aroma into his nose on an express route directly to Randall’s brain. It’s only right then that he sees the room is lit by a single candle on the bedside table, the wick all burnt down to cinders and fighting to keep the flame dancing in its holder.

Randall shifts his gaze from the wilting flame to Matthew’s face, softened by a look of wonder that never fails to make him look young and lovely and untouched by trauma, by worry, by fear. Knowing who he is and what he’s done and what he would do does nothing to shatter the effect of that expression on his face, on Matthew’s entire aura. A few long seconds into looking right back into that look, Randall realizes it’s pointed singularly at him—because of him, _for_ him.

He thinks to say something, mind perking up and trying to bring his body to the same panicked level of alertness, but there’s Matthew’s hand on the back of his neck, staying him, calming him down before he can run or challenge this moment needlessly.

“You should sleep.”

Randall nods, closing his eyes as a concession to his drooping eyelids and to Matthew’s suggestion. He shimmies closer where he knows Matthew’s face lies on the pillow, kisses him where his lips land first, and sinks to sleep.

Matthew watches him a while longer, turns to extinguish the candle flame with two fingers, and settles in where Randall’s body curves at all the appropriate junctures to allow room for him to slide into place next to him. Randall’s hair is a hilarious mess even in the dark. Matthew falls asleep with his fingers wound up in it near the base of Randall’s skull. It’s precisely where he wants to be.


	2. Out on the Tiles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT HAS BEEN MONTHS IN THE MAKING, BUT HERE IT IS AS PROMISED OMG 
> 
> Folks, Browntier's super happy, super cheesy ending. Unbeta'd because I suck.
> 
> <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m just a simple guy, I live from day to day / A ray of sunshine melts my frown and blows my blues away / There’s nothing more that I can say but on a day like today / I pass the time away and walk a quiet mile with you 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> “You said you had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.”  
> \- Henry James, _The Beast in the Jungle_

Randall wakes him at three and they get dressed in the dark, blindly taking up the clothes they’d selected the night before. Matthew pulls on an old shirt he packed into his overnight bag and some ratty sweats he won’t miss if they get damaged too badly.

He’s expecting rips and tears at the least. If there are flesh wounds, then they’re ready for that, too, but Randall hadn’t sounded intent on drawing blood. Matthew appreciates the sentiment, apathetically as it’s given.

When Randall said it, he did that thing that Matthew loves where he sort of pulls his lips back in an almost teasing smile. He’s in the basement staring up at his suit at five minutes till they’re scheduled to leave. Like Randall had when Matthew first saw it, Matthew winds his arms around Randall’s middle from behind and sets his chin on one stiff, warm shoulder.

“Soon.”

A startled moment stretches into a slower one of comprehension. Randall turns and looks at Matthew as if he’s not sure which one of them spoke.

“It’ll be yours soon,” Matthew fills in for him, easing some of the shock out of Randall’s face.

The skull of the beast Randall would become stares back at them. It makes perfect sense to Matthew now that this machine of bone and steel is to be the substitute for Randall’s own dysphoric skin.

He clutches at Randall a little bit tighter, wondering if he’ll still want the other things his flesh allows after he learns what all the beast can offer. It shouldn’t matter. The beast is the most important thing. Randall’s becoming is the most important thing.

On the drive up to the Patapsco Valley State Park, Matthew bounces his knee and keeps his hands clasped together. There’s no real way to prepare to be hunted by one’s boyfriend, so he’s not sure how else to tackle the experience. Randall notices his stress a few minutes into the maze of trees.

“Calm down, Matthew.”

A hysterical laugh bubbles out of Matthew’s throat. He calls on his memory of the first time they made this trip and says, “We’re going on a ride.”

Randall gives a noncommittal shrug. “You’re not tied up this time.”

“Not that I don’t trust you with this, but I _have_ seen you tackle guys twice my size. And you run like the goddamn wind, so…” His hand flies up and traces a nonexistent shape in the air. “No, I won’t calm down.”

The car veers into a careful turn. Randall parks under a tree with a low hanging branch that obscures the view Matthew has out the window on his side.

“Can I do something to make you feel better about it?”

Matthew unbuckles his seatbelt and raises his eyes to meet Randall’s concerned gaze. Well, concerned for Randall.

If he’s ever tried to affect the semblance of expressive emotions when it’s just the two of them, he’s stopped completely as of late. Matthew likes it, to tell the unblemished truth, but it makes moments like these far more difficult to read.

“Okay because I’m actually not sure, I’ll ask. Are you offering me something right now?”

Randall shrugs again. “You always taste different in the morning.”

Matthew blinks. “I’m…oh. Really?”

“Yeah, maybe I imagine it, though. You look most like prey when you’ve just woken up. Maybe that’s what I like.”

A sputtered ‘pfffft’ noise comes out of Matthew’s mouth. Randall has a mischievous twinkle in his eye, though his mouth remains unsmiling. One corner of it looks slightly suppler in the dark. Matthew can’t tell if it’s from smirking or if it’s because Randall’s lips typically puff up after sleeping.

He takes a deep breath and slumps his shoulders, rubbing one hand over his eyes. Randall shifts in his seat but doesn’t touch him.

“Do you feel better?”

It’s so exactly like Randall to ask about results immediately after his attempt to help. Randall stuffed a towel in Matthew’s face to get soap out of his eyes. He hugged Matthew for the first time like a praying mantis bringing a smaller insect to its mouth. 

“Yes, actually.”

“Okay. Good.”

Randall opens his door and gets out of the car. For a few seconds, Matthew holds off on following him around to the back of the Jeep where he’d stitched Randall up before. The blood stains have been cleaned away and the upholstery inside swapped out. All there is to indicate that anything transpired there is the scar Matthew left on Randall’s arm from the pocket knife.

They divvy up the essentials they’ve agreed to carry with them. Randall ends up with a lightweight backpack to hold the bulk of what they’re prepared to need if anything should go wrong while they’re miles away from their vehicle. Matthew’s got a compass and a ‘spring-assisted’ knife that’s gorgeous but looks vicious as hell. He tries to leave it behind, but Randall insists that he take it, so he does. 

Maybe to put a damper on his uncertainty about pocketing the folded blade, Randall tells him, “It wasn’t expensive. I won’t be heartbroken if you lose it out there.”

“You’re not gonna make me use this on you.”

“Are you sure I’m not?”

There’s nothing inherently threatening or even aggressive about how Randall says it. The threat and aggression lies in the fact that neither of them is sure that he won’t.

“Okay. Fuck it. I’m running.”

“Wait.” Randall takes two steps toward Matthew to close their distance and kisses him with both hands cupping Matthew’s face. It’s a tender thing, testing and not really meant to daze at all. He murmurs right up against Matthew’s lips, “I want to feel the difference between before and after.”

_Cheater._

Matthew, utterly fucking dazed by that point, darts his tongue quickly into Randall’s mouth and pulls away before Randall can react. He points at him as he walks backwards toward the tree-line. 

“You don’t play fair, Tier.”

“Just keeping it interesting.”

He sees Randall tip his head and then there are only trees and shards of night sky that show through the leaves. For the first few minutes, Matthew runs. He only narrowly avoids trees and almost falls on his face every few yards.

It rained the night before so once he changes his pace to a fast walk, his footsteps sink into an inaudible rhythm on the earth. He stays close to the trees, not liking the vulnerability of open spaces. Randall said he’d give him a head start, but Matthew has no idea how much ground he’s covered or when Randall will have started to tail him.

It’s a rush.

The wildlife in the area doesn’t trouble him much. At one point while climbing a tree with a generous amount of foliage, he feels something crawling on his hand but allows it. With any luck, Randall won’t come this way at all and if he does, then hopefully he won’t have seen Matthew shimmy up this tree. The last thing he wants is to be found out because of a bug.

His patience doesn’t immediately reward him. He isn’t up in the tree long enough for the sun to rise, but it feels like a long time all the same. The bug wanders off somewhere, or maybe Matthew’s just been ignoring it for long enough that he’s tricked himself into not feeling it.

Randall picked a good night to host this hunt of theirs. It’s dark and the moon is a thin sliver in the sky, not offering up much light outside of what their eyes adjust to seeing. From his perch in the tree, Matthew can see a few miles in all directions but only if he turns. If he turns, he risks shaking the branches or God forbid, something in his back or shoulders popping. He sits still, worsening his chances of being able to flee if Randall does catch up to him.

It was a bad idea to camp out in the tree. Having a safe spot high up to recover his energy was a good thing. Staying long enough in one position that his joints are locking up and his limbs starting to go stiff is a Very Bad Thing.

Matthew’s considering getting down from the tree when he sees movement through a parting in the trees. He squints through leaves and nightfall and sees, there, a figure tracing his steps.

His stomach drops. He’d been counting on the darkness and the moisture in the leaves to not give him away, but apparently Randall has night vision in addition to his eagle eyes. Shit.

He should jump from the tree, but at this distance, Randall might hear him. More than that, Randal might _see_ him. And Matthew knows even if they haven’t raced that Randall is a faster runner than he is.

“Fuck it,” he whispers to himself.

It’d be worse to get cornered in the tree than to get chased down. Well. Maybe not. He works himself down nearer to the bottom anyway, arguing that he needs to get closer to the ground before he jumps. There’s less chance of alerting Randall that way and at least now he knows which direction he’s coming from.

Matthew waits several feet above the ground on a branch too high to be reached and holds his breath, listening. It takes a moment, but he can hear Randall coming. His steps are light and quick, so it takes straining on Matthew’s part to pinpoint where he is. Once he’s gotten an idea of how much farther Randall stills needs to come to get to his location, Matthew conceives of a plan.

It may have been unfair not to tell Matthew that he had some of these trails memorized like the back of his hand. Randall’s no tracking expert, but he can anticipate the bends in the trail and can guess depending on how the land slopes which fork Matthew will have chosen.

He slows to a hesitant halt in the path and crouches at the sight of something on the ground. It’s a sock. It’s Matthew’s poison-ivy-green sock.

Randall looks around, perplexed and wondering if he’s meant to pocket the one lonely sock. He does just because he’s not sure he’ll remember where it is later. Matthew might be upset to have lost a sock, but really, if that’s the case he ought to have kept it on his foot.

_Matthew Brown, what are you doing?_

As he’s straightening out from his kneeling position on the ground, he finds himself facing a tree with decently low branches and reaches for one without thinking. He tightens his hold on it, hoists himself up a ways, and peers through the branches. It’s really dark out tonight, but not so dark that he thinks he’d miss someone sitting a few feet in front of him. 

But still. Leaves are nature’s obfuscation. He climbs up into the tree, sits on a wide, strong bough, and uses the vantage point to scope out the surroundings. It’s a nice spot. He can see miles in all directions. Randall gets his breathing under control and searches for movement.

Randall is about to head back to solid ground when a flutter of motion catches his eye. It could have been anything, really. That’s how brief his glimpse of it was. He’s willing to take a gamble on it anyway.

He eases down the ladder rungs the branches make and jumps solidly to the ground, not caring that he makes enough noise to give away his position. If Matthew hears him coming, he might get startled into blowing his own cover. Randall jogs vaguely north toward the thing he saw moving.

There’s no definitive way to tell whether he’s close or not. Patapsco Valley State Park isn’t so vast that he’d never find Matthew if he went the wrong way, but it could perhaps take a bit longer to just find him than Randall initially thought.

Some frightened rabbits and one squeaking mouse later, Randall stops by another tree with the second of Matthew’s forsaken socks left at its base. He pockets it like he did the other one and looks around.

The first time he thought Matthew was being cute, but this is more than teasing. It’s an invitation.

_You’re on the right track,_ he imagines Matthew saying, but then stops cold.

Matthew could only trust Randall to find his breadcrumbs if he knew for certain that Randall was close. In all likelihood, Matthew had seen Randall coming from far off—plodding and obvious as he had been—and had taken to stalking his stalker. A nervous, excited shiver thrums up Randall’s spine, lingering in the back of his neck where he imagines teeth sinking in and claiming him.

He hadn’t expected this. He wonders if Matthew had, but counts the possibility as unlikely. Matthew doesn’t do expressive theater for emotions he doesn’t feel—not with Randall. He’d been afraid when they drove closer to their destination. His fear had been real.

“Can you hear me, Matthew?”

Randall waits. There’s no answer. Of course there isn’t.

“I think you can.” Randall walks a few paces back the way he came, swinging his gaze through the shadows for anything. He walks forward and scans higher up in the trees. “I know what you’re doing, Matthew.”

_I like it._

He holds it inside of him with the ends of his teeth and with claws that scrape. Matthew could be baited that way, but Randall doesn’t want to lure him. He wants to run Matthew down and take him in his arms for the few seconds before they hit the ground as one body.

“My very first thought was that you managed to spontaneously lose your sock. Imagine my confusion.”

Randall slips into the labyrinth of trees and keeps his eyes on the trail he’d been using. He waits beneath a tree and listens. The force of the quiet in the air roars in his ears like an undiscovered species of predator. Somewhere less than a yard away from his current position, a twig snaps.

He doesn’t breathe.

Softly, so softly, he hears Matthew say, “Oh my God.”

And then they’re both running. Matthew darts onto the trail where he can put the most distance between them and switches back to the clutter of trees and brush where speed is meaningless. Randall’s not close enough to grab him and if he makes a leap for him, he’ll just end up on his face and in Matthew’s dust.

He keeps up the pace. It’s easier for him than it is for Matthew to navigate around spindly plant life and fallen logs, so he closes in on a few of the feet Matthew has ahead of him. He also has the benefit of knowing where they’re going even if Matthew clearly doesn’t. Randall stops once the quality of the dirt begins to change and makes himself scarce even as Matthew sprints ahead.

Randall’s close enough to see Matthew stop dead in his tracks once he stumbles upon the river. He doesn’t fall in, but Randall can see that it was a near thing.

They would have gone crashing into the water had Randall kept going after him. Instead, he slinks lion-like toward Matthew’s silhouette against the water that their bit of land overlooks. Matthew doesn’t swear aloud now, but Randall can hear his panic. He _knows_ Randall is just behind him, prowling. He just doesn’t know _where_.

The sound of the water babbling so close to them drowns out the smaller noises in their shared vicinity. Randall relies on his eyes to track Matthew’s indecisiveness, loving this shift in their dynamic. Well aware that he’s being watched, Matthew turns his back to the water and peers cautiously through the trees. Slowly, Randall stands from his low crouch.

Matthew’s body goes visibly taut with tension. He twists on his heel and jumps off the slight ledge into the river a good four or five feet below. Randall takes off after him. It’s a straight shot from the drop to the other side and there’s nowhere to hide.

He leaps down into the calf-deep water that lets out into much deeper river at a different break in the woods. The water’s cold and soaks through his shoes. His legs pump harder because of it.

Only a short distance is left between him and Matthew. He’s trying not to entertain thoughts like ‘prize’ or ‘reward’ because really, it’s discomfiting to think of Matthew in those terms. His mind races off with them anyway, crooning sweet promises that burn in his blood like the ache buzzing in his muscles.

Matthew’s put up a good show so far. Randall’s heart thuds out of more than just exertion thinking about how Matthew will ride the takedown. He wonders if a grunt or a wheeze will jolt past his lips or if he’ll be quiet and squirm until escape is a distant dream.

In the scant moonlight, Matthew’s shoulders shift and roll as he runs. Randall hones in on the rollicking motion of them as he closes in. With the muddy bank in plain sight, Randall knows he’s about to catch Matthew.

He’s within reach as it is, but he can’t risk taking Matthew down in the water. In his determination for this night not to be geared toward harm for one or both of them, he can’t make himself forget the depth of the shallow water. It’s deep enough to drown in if one’s laid out flat, and that’s exactly how he intends impact to go.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit…”

Matthew staggers onto the bank. The transition from dragging water to solid ground throws him off, but it doesn’t hinder Randall’s pursuit. He gets one foot planted on the mud and vaults himself at Matthew who’s in the process of looking over his shoulder. They land noisily, their fall punctuated by ragged inhales, choked exhales, clothes sopping wet, and chaotic, fumbling hands.

He’s rolled over. Matthew’s awkward sideways landing makes it harder for him to get leverage, so he ends up half-flailing with his shoulder digging into Randall’s solar plexus. 

“Work for it,” Matthew hears himself saying, muffled by Randall’s chest. His heart is a rabid thing pounding beneath Matthew’s cheek. His shirt is soaked through with either sweat or river water. “Make me submit and I will.”

Their current position puts Matthew in a good way to keep Randall subdued, but the angle his arm is stuck in traps him with fewer available options. He can sense that Randall knows Matthew is more restrained than he is.

Matthew twists to get his arm out from between their bodies and secures his arms around Randall’s shoulders to keep him down, but it’s not enough. He almost can’t track what happens next.

One second he’s on Randall and covering him from an angle. The next, he’s being lifted off. For a single wild moment, he thinks they’ve been found by other park goers, but then the ground comes up hard and fast beneath his back and Randall’s arm is there cradling the back of his neck to cushion the landing.

Randall pins him, and for the life of him, Matthew can’t figure out how to replicate whatever sorcery Randall did to reverse their roles. He tries to kick off the ground with his feet, but Randall’s there, too.

Their legs weave together and between that tangle of limbs and Randall’s arm barred across his throat, Matthew can’t think straight. The arm beneath his chin has no weight behind it. It’s only there—a certainty. Randall’s gasping for breath just like Matthew is. His face is shiny and his eyes look huge, widened by some emotion Matthew can’t name.

He opens his mouth to surrender and Randall dives down to stop him with his lips. He tastes like the trees they’ve been running through and he smells like the river they crossed.

Matthew musters up the mental acuity to have the thought that those two sensations should be swapped and that Randall should smell of the trees and taste of the river. Randall lifts his mouth from Matthew’s lips and lets out a guttural groan that sounds more like an utterance of pain than of pleasure.

“You are,” he whispers, breathless and worn and beautiful. Randall wavers and buries his words in Matthew’s cheek. “You are. You’re like me.”

Matthew goes slack, aided along by the warm, melting feeling in his chest. The arm barred over Matthew’s chin slides away. He drops his head back to bare his throat, half-expecting Randall to howl.

Instead Randall laughs. And laughs.

With the river’s essence clinging to his hair in tiny, glowing beads, Randall looks like the gods bore him out of ichor and ice. Like the blood of a thousand animal sacrifices brought him to life.

\--

Randall shows up at the BSHCI in a sweater vest. Chilton doesn’t look twice at Matthew’s order for Gideon to be removed from his cell. He’s on his way to a ‘therapy’ session with Graham, so he barely even glances at Randall while Matthew’s escorting him to the cages.

Matthew drops Randall off at the wall opposite the cage he put Graham in the night he was contracted to kill Lecter. He doesn’t mention it. Gideon will already be bringing his A-game to figure out the best way to get into Randall’s head.

Gideon is annoyed at Matthew’s disturbance. He almost doesn’t even cooperate, but by some miracle he gets him in restraints and carts him off to the cages. Randall is standing exactly where and how Matthew left him. He looks in their direction when the door opens, and Matthew counts his blessings that even if Gideon gets to him, he won’t get to Randall. Not anywhere that Gideon will see anyway.

“Well hello. Are you a student or a doctor? I’m afraid _the nurse_ neglected to mention the nature of your visit.”

Matthew locks up the cage, removes Gideon’s cuffs, and shoots Randall a questioning glance before striding clean out of the room. They’d talked extensively about how they needed to handle this exchange. Any series of events they charted where Matthew stays in the room to supervise doesn’t end well for them.

Of course, it being Gideon, most ways end well for him. Matthew did his part to warn Randall of the caliber of personality he’d be dealing with, but Randall didn’t and doesn’t let on that he’s intimidated.

He sets up in the surveillance office and listens, carefully checking the setup again. It projects the audio from the cages without recording it, just like they planned. Chilton probably won’t even ask to hear Gideon’s session. They’d discussed this possibility, too. Randall had gone out of his way to look unimpressive and painfully average. 

It kills Matthew that they can’t flaunt their power here in this place. But that’s why he’s on tech in a separate room and why Randall’s handling their predicament.

Case and point, Randall has no interest in impressing anybody. Nor is he deeply impressed by Gideon in general. He tends not to be awed by people unless they’ve done something to warrant his attention.

So far all Gideon’s really done is force Matthew to be held accountable for a stupid decision he made to kill someone for Will Graham. It makes Randall’s stomach tighten in imagined nausea when he thinks about the ‘false alarm’ Dr. Lecter had.

Gideon told.

If Matthew had gone through with it, he would have been caught. It’s unfathomable.

Matthew belongs at Randall’s side and nowhere else. If one of them should ever be caught, then they should go away together just as a matter of course. The same goes, he might say, for Lecter and Will Graham.

And then there’s Gideon. Gideon’s been staring at him since Matthew left the room.

As if he can tell that Randall has directed his thoughts back to a possible conversation, his lips twitch into a withered smirk.

“Judging by the vague air of hostility about you, I’m going to guess you are neither a doctor nor a student. So what is it then? Who sent the boy with death in his eyes to come and speak to me?”

Randall steps away from the wall but doesn’t reply. Gideon narrows his eyes.

“I’ll guess then, shall I?” He presses his lips together. His expression is a scowl crossed with a grimace. “Did Alana Bloom send you? More like her to send someone in her place than Hannibal Lecter. But why would they send you to me and not to Mr. Graham? And _why_ would Chilton allow it? It’s a curious, curious thing.”

For all his musing aloud, Gideon doesn’t sound curious at all. Randall respects his disinterest. He feels a shred of it mirrored in himself.

“I’ll be honest, though. You strike me as someone with more of an affinity for madness than the straight and narrow, which rules out Dr. Bloom and Dr. Chilton evenly. No matter how they like to put on airs, they’re quite ordinary, both of them. Too steeped in the trivialities of psychosis to really penetrate the heart of it. Which leaves Dr. Lecter and the potential means of his ruin, Will Graham. So which one is it, Mr…” Gideon squints. “Marcher.”

“Neither.”

“Neither.” Gideon hums. “Jack Crawford then. Freddie Lounds?”

“They would have come in person.”

“Then I confess it. I’m at a loss as to whose allegiance you keep. But here you are before me, neither a doctor nor a student.”

Randall studies Gideon’s agitation, measuring it. He doesn’t think it will help them if he acts cute with Gideon. There’s a time and a place to taunt. Taunting Gideon isn’t important to Randall in the first place. Getting him to forget all about Matthew _is_ important.

“There was a threat on Hannibal Lecter’s life. You informed on Will Graham’s scheme, but you never named the individual involved.”

“Is that what this is about?” Gideon drones, obviously bored. He even rolls his eyes. “You’re one of Lecter’s then. Come looking for blood? Maybe you’d like me to deliver a message.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Nothing like that,” Gideon mocks. “Just what is it that you do want, Mr. Marcher?”

Randall takes a few steps closer. He doesn’t need to look at the tile to remember where the line is. While Matthew was out procuring Gideon, he studied it intently, committed it to memory. His steps stop just shy of the yellow line.

“I don’t need you to tell me who the collaborator was. I already know.”

He watches, with the mildest interest, how Gideon works through that response. His face lights up for the briefest moment with understanding. It darkens just as quickly with a sneer.

“So you and Mr. Brown, huh? That…well, I’ll admit, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You’re in bed with him, right? That’s about the only way it _would_ make sense to me.”

Randall doesn’t react to Gideon’s attempt to fluster him. He just blinks and says, “I am in bed with him.”

And then it’s Gideon’s turn to blink. Several times.

Randall tips his chin back slightly and adds, “We wanted them but they wanted each other. It took some doing, but we decided we don’t want anything to do with either of them. You can see where I’m going with this.”

Gideon smiles and the twist of it is definitely indulgent. “You’d like my silence.”

“Isn’t that what you’d like?” Randall intones, hardly putting the inflection at the end to make it into a question. “Silence.”

“You make a compelling case, of course. There’s just one problem with your basic premise for coming to me at all.”

“Now I’m in your sights. So is Matthew,” Randall answers, nodding. 

“My, you _are_ straightforward, aren’t you?” Gideon’s smirk flashes into an impish grin. “Not an equivocating bone in your body.”

“I don’t know. _You_ still don’t know what I am.”

The smile on his adversary’s face fades, but he doesn’t look disappointed. In fact, he looks distantly pleased.

“And Mr. Brown.” Gideon ducks his head but keeping his eyes on Randall. He gives a little chuckle. “Mr. Brown does know.”

“He does.”

“You had to have outperformed Will Graham to catch his attention. You had to outperform _Hannibal Lecter_ ,” Gideon muses, allowing one eyebrow to creep up toward his hairline. He sounds as though he’s actually curious, which strikes Randall as a potential problem. They hadn’t planned for it. “What did you do to him?”

Randall pauses to come up with a coherent answer. They really, _really_ hadn’t planned for this conversation. His relative sense of shock passes and all he’s left with is a warm awareness for his relationship with Matthew and what it means.

“I told him the truth.” He raises his gaze to meet Gideon’s. “I made him tell me the truth.”

A low, thoughtful hum is all he gets for a few seconds. Gideon seems to really chew on what Randall’s said. Randall’s terrible about these things, but he can almost see the exact second Gideon’s solemn contemplation takes on a derisive edge.

“And what was his truth? That he was ready to kill for Will Graham out of some misguided affection he now points solely at you? Assuming he _does_ point it singularly at you now.”

Randall waits for more. He imagines what Matthew would say if he were still in the room. He might insist against what Gideon’s implying. It’s not in Matthew all the time to quietly swallow his pride and let himself be the butt of a joke.

“And believe me,” Gideon continues, with a little glint dancing in his eyes, “your boy was only _too_ eager to do _anything_ Will Graham asked of him.”

“I don’t doubt it. I was the same way.” It makes him sick to think of it. He’d been so sure when Lecter was all he could fathom having that Lecter was the best he could do. That he would never find anyone else who might even try to understand him—much less someone who would be amazed at him, like Matthew is always. “That’s my truth. Part of it.”

“The part you’re going to tell me,” Gideon croons. “What I’d like for you to tell me next is why I should do anything for you. Not out of the goodness of my heart, certainly.”

“That would presume too much, Doctor.”

“Yes it would.” Gideon raises his eyebrows like Randall’s agreement confuses him. “Let’s hear your terms then, Mr. Marcher. Fascinating as you are, the sooner you’re out of my hair, the better.”

Randall reviews the points Matthew helped him assemble. He licks his lips.

“Matthew protects you from the other staff here. He told me they don’t talk highly of you since you killed Mary Trevor.”

“That they do not.”

“If you expose him, your main cover in this hospital will be gone. They’ll torment you, and that’s if they don’t kill you.”

“A lukewarm prospect at best, Mr. Marcher.”

“There’s also me.” He feels the impulse to swallow his nerves and pushes it away. Gideon can’t know he’s affected by this turn in the conversation. “I have access to Dr. Lecter. If you do anything against Matthew, I’ll make sure he goes after you.”

“You’re getting warmer, but you’re going in the wrong direction.” Gideon clicks his tongue. “You’ve told a pretty story, to be sure, and trying to get at the precise root of what your hiding under that baby face is driving me a very fun kind of crazy, but what you ought to be playing at is my vanity. Threats are so pitifully dull. That was his idea, wasn’t it? Mr. Brown’s?” Gideon looks around and speaks toward the ceiling. “Your flair for doom and dramatics does not transfer well onto your better half, Mr. Brown? Points deducted for bad taste.”

Randall almost smiles. Gideon catches him at it. The way his eyes harden gives Randall a bizarre flutter of hope.

“You have access to Dr. Lecter. Pause.” Gideon holds up his hand and turns it gently to the side. “Mr. Brown has access to Will Graham.” He holds up his hand again. “Pause.”

“What are you suggesting?”

As if he’s put out that he has to explain it, Gideon huffs moodily and twists his mouth into a pout. “See, now, _this_ Mr. Brown _would_ be good at. Look.” He weaves his arms through the holes in the cage and bends them at the elbows. “The only possible thing you could offer me that would have any value whatsoever is something that I cannot provide myself. It’s just a basic principle of bartering. See?”

Randall nods.

“So. The other basic principle of bartering is that what you give to me must be something that I want. And one thing that I want more than I need protection is to even the score just a little bit.”

“Me on Dr. Lecter and Matthew on Will Graham,” Randall says.

Gideon’s lips stretch into a slow, satisfied smile. He claps a few times and murmurs, “Bingo.”

Matthew is horrified. He’s horrified, but he’s also deeply, overwhelmingly proud. Randall went into the lion’s den with Gideon prepared to say two to four things and used none of them. He told Gideon about their relationship and about his uncomfortable past allegiance to Dr. Lecter, and he did it without flinching.

If it weren’t a detriment to the effect they’re trying to have, Matthew would run clean out of the room and kiss Randall on the mouth right there in front of Gideon. As it is, he waits for Randall to signal that they’re done, which he does by saying the words, “It was the truth, vivid and monstrous.”

Matthew disconnects the feed and leaves the wires in an outright mess. Chilton won’t be able to set it to rights unassisted if he wanders into this office before Matthew gets back to it.

When he walks back into the cages to retrieve Gideon, Gideon’s saying something to Randall that’s too quiet to be heard from a distance. He gets within earshot and recognizes Gideon’s words instantly. It’s another quote from _The Beast in the Jungle_. It’s not the same one Randall used for his signal.

““…from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.””

Gideon looks at Matthew when he stops walking a ways yet from his cell. The smile on his face is teasing but manages, somehow, not to look cruel. He slides his glance from Matthew to Randall in a good humor.

“The May Bertram to your John Marcher. Think he’ll save you?”

Randall doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move. Matthew gets Gideon back in his cuffs, takes him out of the cage, and walks him back to the cell block. The door buzzes open and he checks Graham’s cell as he’s locking up the door. It’s empty. They timed it perfectly.

“Did you ever read Henry James, Mr. Brown?”

“Yes.” He picks at Gideon’s cuffs with a key through the gap in the door. “Why?”

“Maybe you oughtta read it again,” Gideon purrs, rubbing at his wrists as he turns slowly to face Matthew. “It’s packed with all sorts of amusing imagery.”

“Lunch is in an hour, Dr. Gideon.”

“Yes, Mr. Brown.” Gideon smirks at him. “Thank you, Mr. Brown.”

Randall is gone when he makes it back to the front desk, but it’s just as well. Chilton’s in the process of walking Will Graham back to his cell and while Graham assuredly does not look at him, Chilton walks right over. 

“Anything interesting to report?”

Graham’s unit stops by a door to get it open. Matthew bides his time trying to stop Chilton from saying anything about Gideon’s visitor or what he looked like.

“Actually, I was just in Technical. Think the place needs to be rewired.”

Chilton sighs gustily. “Well that’s terrific. Anything _good_ to report? What about Gideon?”

Will looks their way. Matthew wills himself not to return his glance.

“He was surly when I took him back. Wanted to know when lunch was.”

“The typical prisoner’s mindset, I suppose.” He sighs, the kind that has voice behind it. “This one was about as helpful.”

Matthew looks out of instinct. Graham’s face is a mask, but his eyes look _pissed._

_Good,_ Matthew thinks. _Fuck you._

Randall would be proud of him. Maybe even Gideon, too.

\--

“Are you sure about this?” Randall asks with his voice and eyes flat, fingers fidgeting with his collar. “We can still leave.”

“Uh, I _am_ sure, yes. And no, we can’t still leave. We said we were going to do this; we’re doing it. It’s fine, Randall.”

“I don’t know.”

Randall sighs and sets his hands limply by his sides. He flicks his gaze away, a little twitch shivering in his jaw. Matthew reaches for him and traces the tendons in his wrist until he wins back his attention.

“What are you worried about? This was your idea.”

Matthew winds his fingers around the back of Randall’s hand and squeezes. Randall bites his lip to hide a grimace and averts his eyes again.

“Hey. This is a good thing. You trust me with it. I know what it means.”

He takes his hand away and looks over his shoulder at the two figures approaching them. The first woman catches his eyes, flicks her gaze to his hand on Randall’s, and positively _beams_ at him. Before even clocking her features, he knows which sister she is.

Josie is brunette, blue-eyed, and has a high forehead to match Randall’s. She’s pretty like Randall is pretty with his same too-pristine skin. The delicate brown mole she has above one eyebrow reminds him strikingly of the one Randall has on his cheek. She gets to their table and immediately leans in to plant a kiss on her brother’s cheek. Not where his mole is, but higher up on the curve of his cheekbone.

Matthew almost doesn’t notice Diana by comparison. She’s more severe, doesn’t return smiles to strangers, and while not physically imposing, still manages to look like she would hold her own in a fistfight. Matthew wasn’t afraid of Hannibal Lecter, but he would fess up to feeling cowed at the very least by Diana’s sheer force of presence.

Randall doesn’t smile at his older sister when she reaches their table. He tenses up, visibly, and squeezes Matthew’s hand like it’s a particularly difficult nut he’s trying to crack open.

Matthew allows his hand to be crushed. It would only alarm Randall to alert him to it.

“So you’re Matthew,” Josie says, beaming at him and looking startlingly like her brother except for older, happier. She sneaks a conspiratorial glance at Randall and says, gently teasing, “We’ve heard bits and pieces.”

“Josie has,” Diana interrupts smoothly. The expression she’s pointing at Matthew errs on the polite side of glaring. “I’ve heard less.”

Josie shoots Diana a harsh glance. At his side, Randall hasn’t moved from his initial statue-like pose. Matthew pries his hand as stealthily as he can out from beneath Randall’s claw of a hand. He goes for what he knows to be Randall’s underbelly and sets his hand on the back of his neck, letting his fingers trace misshapen circles beneath the ends of his hair. Randall stiffens, makes a conscious choice to relax, and slumps. Matthew’s close enough that he can hear the tiny sigh escape his mouth.

Matthew doesn’t risk saying anything that will compromise Randall’s calm. He just focuses on the slant of Randall’s nose in profile until Randall eventually turns to look at him.

“Hi.”

“Hey you,” Matthew murmurs back.

Randall darts his eyes to his sisters and so does Matthew. They’re both looking at him but with drastically different expressions on their faces. Josie looks moved. Diana mostly looks suspicious. Matthew makes a note to go out of his way to impress her tonight.

“Sorry,” Randall mutters.

Josie’s eyes soften at the word. Diana frowns and looks away, obviously uncomfortable.

“Tonight’s supposed to be about grilling your boyfriend, Randall,” she says, making Josie and Randall both look at her. Diana adds a touch of softness that sounds like mercy to her voice. “Don’t look so nervous.”

Matthew digs the flats of his fingers into Randall’s hair. It’s just a solid pressure against his skull for him to concentrate on.

“I’m sorry you had to hear about Matthew from Josie.”

Diana, for just a shred of a second, looks hurt. She hides it well after that moment, but by then Matthew’s seen it and he knows that that’s what Diana’s worried about. For all that she appears not to want to be here, it’s important to her that Randall’s not wasting his time with someone who won’t treat him right. Matthew can respect that.

He thinks, actually, that he’s already going quite a ways to prove that he’s good for Randall. Least of all, they’ve already demonstrated that Randall trusts Matthew enough to allow his offers of comfort. Matthew would bet money it’s a rare thing for Randall to give anyone—and not only that, but he’d bet that his sisters know how rare it is. Which is why, he’s sure, Josie looks at Matthew _already_ like he’s precious.

Diana shrugs. “Don’t worry about me, little brother.”

Josie drops her chin into her palm with a slightly misty look at her sister. “This is like when we were kids.”

Randall snorts—quietly, but a quiet snort is still a snort. “When we were kids, we threw lemon wedges at each other.”

“Don’t act like that’s not the reason you love lemon cakes today,” Diana cuts in with raised eyebrows.

“You do really, really love lemon cakes, Randall,” Matthew says, refusing to be left out of the fun.

“He does!” Josie agrees, impassioned. “He’s obsessed with them!”

The evening progresses in that fashion, with far less artificial gloss and glitter than Matthew had been ready to deflect. He’s actually stunned to find that there are no artificialities between Josie and her brother. They’re warm to each other. Diana is different but equally legible to his eye.

There are times when he catches her staring at one of them, looking befuddled but like she’s doing everything she can to keep up. Matthew wonders if it’s been like this for them their whole lives—if Josie’s always accepted Randall wholeheartedly with perfect ease while Diana watched from the background, an outsider looking in on something she couldn’t cross into.

Matthew plays up all the good ‘couple’ stuff that doesn’t feel too overboard for Randall’s tastes. He touches Randall’s arm often, covers his hand after their plates have been cleared to make room for dessert, and even leans in close to whisper words of encouragement into his ear. It’s on that last point of selling their ‘We’re completely in love and also normal’ act that Randall misreads his intention, turns his face to Matthew’s, and kisses him right there in the restaurant in front of Josie and Diana both.

It’s a short kiss—really more a brush of their lips than anything else, but Matthew’s face is hot and his lips tingling when Randall pulls away.

“Gonna get us in trouble,” Matthew mumbles.

Randall smirks and kisses him again. “Worth it, for you.”

“Oh my God they’re disgusting,” Matthew hears Josie coo from the other side of the table. “ _Diana_ , look at them. They’re disgusting.”

Matthew sees Diana sigh, but her expression is less untrusting than it was an hour ago. Her eyes on Randall are soft and on Matthew they are hard but curious. She doesn’t hate him, at least. He counts it as a win.

As they’re walking out of the restaurant, Josie steals Randall from him in an honest-to-God whirlwind of smiles and sweet little apologies. Randall looks at Matthew over his shoulder and lets Josie walk him to her car with their arms looped together at the elbows. Matthew bounces on his heels and turns to face Diana, who he’s been conveniently left alone with. She still doesn’t smile, nor does she offer him her arm.

“My brother likes you,” she says.

“I like your brother,” Matthew says back.

She looks down, scuffs the ground for a bit with her shoe, and looks up at him again. There’s a tender look of vulnerability in her eyes.

“Take care of him.”

“I plan to.”

“I’m not going to do anything to you if you don’t,” she tells him, not really to reassure him but for some other reason probably. She glances from him to Josie and Randall where Josie is smiling widely enough for them to see it at a distance. “Neither will Josie. Randall, though.”

Diana looks at him and the vulnerability is gone. It’s been replaced so thoroughly by this new thing that he forgets he ever saw anything but strength there.

“Don’t hurt him.”

Matthew doesn’t tell her that the idea isn’t even a possibility anymore. It was once, but Randall kept him from making that mistake.

“Okay.”

Diana studies him for a long moment and gives him her hand to shake. Her hand is warm in his. She leaves him on the curb to find her car. She parked next to Josie, so they reconvene for a moment together with Randall before sending him off to Matthew again. Randall looks blurry and surprised and like he wants to sleep for the next ten years.

“You look rough.”

“You don’t.” Randall sighs. “Do we have hot chocolate at the house?”

Matthew blinks. “Um. _We_ should?”

Randall doesn’t respond to his emphasis on the word ‘we’. He knows what Matthew’s asking, but he ignores it.

“I feel like hot chocolate.”

Matthew blinks at him some more. Randall grabs his hand and walks him back to his Jeep.

“You feel like hot chocolate.”

“I feel like a lot of things right now.”

“I can see that.”

Randall accidentally walks to Matthew’s side and opens the door for him. Matthew starts to climb into the Jeep when Randall acts on an impulse he’s been feeling for the past hour and a half. He reaches out and fumbles to get his hands on Matthew’s shoulders so he can pull him back down and kiss him hard and thorough like he’s needed to.

Matthew goes to jelly. He tends to when Randall kisses him first. It’s a confidence boost if nothing else—but it’s plenty in addition to that one beautiful thing.

“This is the second time you’ve kissed me senseless in a parking lot, Randall,” Matthew mumbles at him. He sounds amused but something else that throws Randall for a solid loop. It’s more than contentment and it’s deeper than satisfaction. “I’m starting to think you have an exhibition kink.”

Randall looks at the wide, dizzy smile on Matthew’s face. He remembers the way his throat looked surrendered in the moonlight. Randall’s face goes slack in something like awe. Matthew’s pinches up in immediate concern.

“You’re happy,” Randall whispers.

Matthew goes blank for a terrifying moment and then clears like the sun emerging from a break in the clouds. He smiles and kisses Randall, soft at first but steadily deepening. That’s the way Matthew likes to kiss—that’s how he likes to do most things, slow but with growing depth and lingering magnitude.

“I am. Are you?”

“Yeah.” He gives himself a moment, just like Matthew seems to be giving him a moment, to really hear what he’s just said. “Yeah, I’m happy.”

All the worry that he’d had about tonight dissipates. Like a rubber band held taut and then snapped free, the tension in Randall’s body goes out of him. Matthew catches him with his hands above Randall’s elbows. He’s firm. He’s solid. Not going anywhere.

“Want me to drive?”

“Yes.”

“Still want hot chocolate?” Matthew asks, clearly teasing him.

Randall thinks about it. “Yeah, but not right now.”

“What do you want right now?” Matthew’s eyes get that sparkle like he doesn’t really need to ask. 

“You,” Randall readily admits, “spread out on your back.”

“And then what?” Matthew prompts, cheeky but unable to hide the interest in his dilated pupils.

“And then…I think we should go to New York.”

A wrinkle appears between Matthew’s eyebrows. “New York?”

“I mean not right away, not tonight,” Randall corrects, losing his footing enough to feel disoriented. “But we should go.”

“What’s in…” Matthew’s mouth drops open. “Oh.”

“Only if you want.” His face heats and he clutches uselessly at the ends of his own shirt. “We never talked about it.”

“Talk to Kira. I’ll figure something out with Chilton.”

Randall takes a shaky breath in and out. “Really?”

Matthew’s smile is smaller now but every bit as warm. “Yeah. Yeah, Randall.”

“Good.”

“Great.”

Matthew sneaks the keys out of Randall’s hand with a coy smirk, lands a kiss on his cheek, and runs around the front of the Jeep to climb into the driver’s seat. Randall gets settled and buckled in. He listens to a radio station Matthew chooses and sinks into a slack recline in the passenger’s seat. 

“Matthew,” he says at a stop light. The radio’s on lower than when they were on the freeway. He doesn’t have to project his voice to speak over it, but Matthew still turns it down.

“Hmm?”

Randall bites his lip and the words choke up in his throat. Matthew looks at him and the light from the street changes from red to green right there over his face.

“The light changed,” he mutters.

Matthew redirects his attention to the road. A small grin sits silently on his mouth. It’s not until they’re in Randall’s driveway and Matthew’s switched the engine off that Randall manages to say it.

“I love you.”

“I know you do,” Matthew whispers. Randall hears and sees him swallow. “I love you, too. Let’s go inside.”

Matthew hands Randall his keys back and waits for Randall to get out of the Jeep first. They walk together to the door and for a moment, it feels different between them. Randall opens the door and looks at Matthew as it swings open, wondering if maybe he should have kept it a secret for a while longer or if maybe Matthew said it without meaning it just yet.

But then Matthew smiles, boyish and handsome and daring, and darts into the house. Randall huffs a confused exhale, shakes his head at his choices, and crosses the threshold, smiling, happy, and disgustingly, massively in love.

He supposes he could have chosen worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “It was the truth, vivid and monstrous.”
> 
> “You said you had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.” – Henry James, _The Beast in the Jungle_
> 
>  
> 
> *I HAD TO END IT WITH THEM SAYING I LOVE YOU OKAY DON'T U LOOK AT ME
> 
> **THIS SHIP KILLS ME I LOVE IT

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics by Led Zeppelin 
> 
> Series title based on I Can’t Quit You, Baby by Otis Rush ( _not_ Zeppelin)
> 
> “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” – Archimedes 
> 
> Charleston  
> http://www.charlestonrestaurant.com/uploads/file/dining_menus/Charleston%20Menu%20Options_1.14.15.pdf


End file.
